Sooner or Later Frank

April 14, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You end up listening to his quotient
of rainy day, blue-mooded songs,
Sinatra sounding like he’s in a bar
by drizzly New York docks, the voice
a lived-in confidential baritone
that always seems familiar,
bourbon-shot, 2am reminiscent,
resigned, resistant to the hurt
her phrases neutrally, for bashed about
means changing partners like a shirt,
a red and white striped Brooks Brothers affair,
the tie dropped like a hanging man,
the attitude an emotional outlaw
who never gets the answers right
and talks them into blue and indigo
inflections, gangsterish felt hat
angled defiantly, tipped north or south
for studio or for mafia wear,
and always integral to the Frank look
that’s in the voice: he’s right in life,
so centred in it, he’s like a peach stone
pivotal to brimming texture,
but at the same time sitting in alone
on loneliness, an Alka Seltzer glass
fizzing to opalescence in the hand,
the woman gone, her Chanel scent
left as a fuzzy hangover. It’s loss
he builds on and converts to gain,
but still it’s trouble, win or lose, and both
feed into song – the ones you hear –
his pick-up fuming, just a casual bit,
her lipstick bleeding on a coffee cup,
downtown, while he sits sorting out his socks
to the soundtrack of steady New York rain.

by Jeremy Reed

Welcome back to the Weekly Poem after its impromptu early Easter break. We’re pleased to tell you about a new poetry event for Oxford! Pass On A Poem gathers together people interested in poetry with the aim of sharing favourite poems by reading them aloud. You can also attend just to sample the selections. This first Oxford meeting will take place on Wednesday 11th June. For more details, and to let people know which poem you’d like to share, contact: james.orton@blackwell.co.uk You can also visit the Pass On A Poem website.

‘Sooner or Later Frank’ is copyright © Jeremy Reed, 2014, and reprinted from his book Sooner or Later Frank (2014) by permission of Enitharmon Books.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Jeremy Reed was born in Jersey, Channel Islands, and read for his PhD at the University of Essex. He is widely acknowledged as the most imaginatively gifted British poet of his generation, praised by Seamus Heaney for his ‘rich and careful writing’ and by David Lodge for his ‘remarkable lyric gift’. Björk simply called his work ‘the most beautiful, outrageously brilliant poetry in the world’. His Selected Poems were published by Penguin in 1987. Subsequent collections have been Nineties (Cape, 1990), Dicing for Pearls (1990), Pop Stars (1994), Sweet Sister Lyric (1996), Saint Billie (2001), Duck and Sally Inside (2004) and This is How You Disappear (2007), all from Enitharmon Press. He has also published Heartbreak Hotel (Orion, 2002), a verse biography of Elvis Presley. Jeremy Reed is currently Marine Society Poet Laureate. Sooner or Later Frank is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and you can find out more about it from the Enitharmon website and more about Jeremy Reed from his own website.

Jeremy Reed’s new book will be launched on Thursday 1 May at The Enitharmon Gallery Bookshop,  which is located at 10 Bury Place,  London, WC1A 2JL. The event is not ticketed – entry is free, but places must be reserved by emailing  Lavinia Singer on  info@enitharmon.co.uk You can find more details on the Enitharmon website.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-artist, printer-publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty‐five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month. You can also find Enitharmon on Facebook.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

I Know

March 31, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

You want to go away.
Because they kill all the rabbits here.
But you’re not a rabbit.
Try explaining that to them.

It’s the rabbits that make it impossible.
No, it’s you.
Why me?
Why the rabbits?

If charged by a savage rabbit,
act like you’re dead.
I know that, you know that,
but does the rabbit know it?

And then the sun stops shining.
After how long?
After four days.
Thank you, I thought for a moment you said three days.

Was that it or did it get dark?
What did you think I wanted?
The same story over and over.
I wouldn’t exchange you for anyone else.

by Nachoem M. Wijnberg, translated by David Colmer

The Poetry Centre recently recruited its first ever cohort of interns! Ten students, drawn from across the undergraduate year groups, have already begun work on a variety of projects. Much of their attention will be focussed upon this year’s National Poetry Day (2 October), for which they will be co-ordinating a series of events such as ‘pop-up poetry’ around the city of Oxford. There is more information about the interns on the Centre’s website.

One of the interns’ first events, the Brookes Poetry Slam, takes place this Wednesday 2 April, from 6.45 at Union Hall (in the new John Henry Brookes Building). All Brookes students are invited to take part, and everyone is invited to be part of the audience. It’s free! If you’d like to read, please contact Wolf Hounsome on brookesslam@gmail.com You can find more details on the Poetry Centre’s Facebook page.

Notes from Anvil Press:

This selection introduces a major poet who is also a business studies professor, a combination which may explain his vigorous questioning of human values in poetry which asks ‘What is worthwhile?’ His poems are characterized by simplicity and clarity, narrative and reasoning: he claims they ‘at least promise to be about the important things in everyone’s life.’ The book from which this poem is taken, Advance Payment, Selected Poems, was a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation in 2013.

Nachoem M. Wijnberg, born in Amsterdam in 1961, has published fourteen volumes of poetry. A Law and Economics graduate, he became in 2005 the first Professor of Cultural Entrepreneurship and Management at the University of Amsterdam Business School. His poetry has won many prizes, including the Jan Campert Prize, the Ida Gerhardt Prize and the most prestigious Dutch prize for poetry, the VSB Poetry Prize. Nachoem Wijnberg will be appearing with Arjen Duniker and Anne Vegter, the current Poet Laureate for the Netherlands, at the Wenlock Poetry Festival on Sunday 27 April from 4.30-5.30pm. You can find out more about this event from the festival website.

David Colmer is an Australian writer and translator based in Holland. He was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s Translation Prize and PEN Medallion and is a two-time winner of the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize. His translations include Martinus Nijhoff’s Awater and selections from Ramsey Nasr, Cees Nooteboom and Hugo Claus.

Anvil Press, founded in 1968, is based in Greenwich, south-east London, in a building off Royal Hill that has been used at various points in its 150-year history as a dance-hall and a printing works. Anvil grew out of a poetry magazine which Peter Jay ran as a student in Oxford and retains its small company ethos. Visit Anvil’s website here, where you can sign up to their mailing list to find out about new publications and events.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Wooden Bird

March 24, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

What about the soldiers? What of them?
When the later ones came, how did they seem to you?
They were grown-ups. I don’t know.
They had rabbit fur ushankas and heavy coats.
Yes, they sat in the square. That’s it?
They wanted bread.
Did you give them any? My mother gave me some
to hand them.
They were carving birds.
Out of lime wood, I think, because it’s softer.
I gave one of the soldiers some bread
in return for a wooden bird.
I used to run with it, my arm stretched
high above my head.
One of its wings broke off.
But all through the war, through grey sky,
over blue oceans, over green lakes and rivers,
red dots of capital cities, brown bumps
of the mountains around and around
the astonishing globe we flew together.

by Maria Jastrzębska

Ever wondered how the Weekly Poem got started? Find out by reading this article on the Poetry Centre website, and encourage your friends to sign up!

The Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre is collaborating with the Oxford-based mental health charity, The Archway Foundation, on an 18-month project funded by Time to Change. The project is aimed at reducing stigmas around mental health issues. The first of a series of multimedia creative arts events takes place this Saturday afternoon at the Asian Cultural Centre on Manzil Way, off the Cowley Road. Please feel free to come along. You can find more details on the Archway website.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

Maria Jastrzębska was born in Warsaw, Poland and came to the U.K as a child. At the Library of Memories (Waterloo Press 2013) is her third full length collection. She co-translated Elsewhere by Iztok Osojnik (Pighog Press 2011) and her drama Dementia Diaries toured nationally in the same year. She is co-editor of Queer in Brighton (New Writing South 2014). You can read more about her work on her blog.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output.

Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

The Bindon Landslide

March 17, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

When the earth began to move, cracks daggering
the chalk cliff path, they thought nothing of it,
went home to their beds, the landlord’s Christmas
whisky still hot on their breath, bellies happy
with sweetmeats and pickle. They slept with deep,
dark dreams of the day, of the horse buckling
in the limestone quarry and heavy hods cutting
their shoulders, then darker dreams of sulphur
and sinkholes, dank pools of bitumen, rivers
of leachate, pipelines, convoys, midnight tankers,
and the sea roaring, agitated, an intolerable
stench that woke them, their tenements rending
and sinking, the moon in the window entirely ajar,
fissures gaping, they’d say, like the mouth of hell.

by Michael McKimm

Tonight at 5.30pm at Regent’s Park College in Oxford, Cindy Aalders will be giving a talk entitled ‘The Life and Hymns of Anne Steele’, in which she will discuss one of the most prolific hymn writers and poetesses of the 18th century. Free tickets can be booked at The Angus Library and Archive website, where you can also find information about an exhibition concerned with non-conformist women which accompanies this series of talks.

This week’s publisher, Worple Press, will be appearing at the Cheltenham Poetry Festival from 5-6 April. Events include a showcase of new and established poets on Saturday 5 April, including Stephen Boyce, Sally Flint, John Freeman (whose work featured in a Weekly Poem in June 2013), John Greening, and the author of this week’s poem, Michael McKimm. You can find more details on the Worple website.

‘The Bindon Landslide’ is copyright © Michael McKimm, 2013. It is reprinted from Fossil Sunshine by Michael McKimm (Worple Press, 2013 by permission of Worple Press.

Notes from Worple Press:

Michael McKimm was born in Belfast in and grew up near the Giant’s Causeway. He now lives in London where he works for the Geological Society Library. The poems collected in Fossil Sunshine are the result of a year-long collaboration with earth scientists, in a project funded by Arts Council England. A graduate of the Warwick Writing Programme, Michael won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and was an International Writing Fellow at the University of Iowa in 2010. His debut collection is Still This Need (Heaventree Press, 2009) and he is published in the anthologies Best of Irish Poetry 2010 (Southword Editions, 2009), Best British Poetry 2012 (Salt, 2012) and Dear World & Everyone In It: new poetry in the UK (Bloodaxe, 2013). You can read more of his poems on his website and on his poetry and geology blog.

Worple Press was founded by Peter and Amanda Carpenter in 1997. Since then they have published a wide range of authors, including Iain Sinclair, Joseph Woods, Elizabeth Cook, Beverley Bie Brahic, Clive Wilmer and Kevin Jackson. They published the selected poems of the acclaimed American nature poet Peter Kane Dufault for the first time in the UK (Looking in All Directions); this was followed in 2007 by Kane Dufault’s To be in the same world. Peter Robinson’s The Great Friend and Other Translated Poems was the Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation for Spring 2002. This impressive backlist was augmented in 2012 by three significant titles: Passio: Fourteen Poems by Janos Pilinszky from Clive Wilmer and George Gomori; Riddance by Anthony Wilson; and the republication of William Hayward’s cult novel from 1964, It Never Gets Dark All Night. Over 2013 and 2014 new titles include work from John Greening, Michael McKimm, Peter Robinson, Mary Woodward and Sally Flint. More information can be found on Worple Press’s website and Facebook page.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

Hyas Araneus

March 10, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

All animals have a minimum space requirement,
without which survival is impossible.
Bubbles overlap, social animals
need to stay in touch, it varies species to species.

The critical distance is so precise
it can be measured in centimetres.

The English have characteristically demonstrated
that they are not afraid to plan.

In the spring, each male stickleback
carries out a circular territory.

Social distance in man has been extended
by telephone, TV and the walkie-talkie.

In the cold waters of the North sea
lives a form of crab, Hyas Araneus.

At certain times in the life cycle,
the individual becomes vulnerable to others.

Do we grasp because we have hands
or do we have hands because we grasp?

Crabs are solitary crustaceans –
This is 1966. Look at the advantages

held by those that have a territory, a space
of their own. Look at the advantages.

by Hannah Silva

Notes from Penned in the Margins:

‘Hyas Araneus’ is from Forms of Protest, the debut collection from Hannah Silva. Previously a performance-based poet and a theatre writer, this is the first time Silva has translated her highly experimental work for the page. These poems and experimental texts oscillate between sense and nonsense, meaning and music, always testing the limits of language to represent the lived world.

Hannah Silva’s performance piece Total Man has recently been nominated for the prestigious Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and you can read more about Hannah Silva’s work from the Penned in the Margins site. There you can also hear Silva discuss the relationship between poetry and performance with Penned’s director, Tom Chivers. You can read Hannah Silva’s thoughts on her blog, and follow her on Twitter.

Penned in the Margins is an independent publisher and live literature producer specialising in poetry and based in East London. Founded in 2004, the company has produced numerous literature and performance events, toured several successful live literature shows, published over twenty-five books, and continues to run innovative poetry, arts and performance projects in the capital and beyond.

Their recent anthology, Adventures in Form, was awarded a Special Commendation by the Poetry Book Society and was chosen as one of 50 Best Summer Reads by The Independent. You can visit the Penned in the Margins website here to sign up to the mailing list, and follow the publisher on Facebook and Twitter.

from Soon

March 3, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

There is a woman. Sitting by the door. It slides loudly. She wears a blue
jumper. A beaded necklace. She looks out the window. Her features look
fragile. She’s thinking of her husband. He’s away on business. She doesn’t
trust him. She crosses her arms. The train doesn’t move. She turns her head
towards me.
I know her. I’ve seen her before. At a party in Chelsea. The waiters were
Portuguese. Everyone was rich. Everything was expensive. Even the noise. Even
the smells. Air clogged with entitlement. She wore a long black dress. She
laughed loudly. Her legs were long. You found her pretty. Some music came
on. She swung her hips. So did the others.
Let’s leave, you said. A man came towards us. He was drunk. He spoke of
birds. You enjoyed him. We stayed. You mentioned buzzards. Then marshes.
The sea, I said. No one heard.
We went home.
Your hand was warm.

by Alba Arikha

Two competitions seek entries: for the Dylan Thomas International Poetry Award poets from around the world are invited to submit a single previously un-published poem of a prescribed length in response to the word ‘Harmony’ by 31 March 2014. An award of £2000 will go to the winner and a copy of the poem will be displayed for the next year at the Dylan Thomas Centre. For more details, visit the Prize’s designated website.

And the Poetry Centre and the Ashmolean Museum are still accepting entries for ‘Picture This!’, their Pre-Raphaelite poetry competition, open to all Sixth Formers studying in Oxford. More details can be found on the Ashmolean’s website. The competition deadline is Monday 17 March.

‘from Soon’ is copyright © Alba Arikha, 2013, and is reprinted from Soon (CB editions, 2013) by permission of CB editions.

Notes from CB editions:

Alba Arikha was born and grew up in Paris, and now lives in London. Major/Minor, her memoir about growing up in Paris (where Samuel Beckett was her godfather), was selected among the ‘Best Books of 2012’ by The New Yorker; she has also published a novel and a short-story collection, and has recorded a CD of her songs, Dans les rues de Paris. In Soon, the book-length narrative poem from which the above extract is taken, a train comes to an unscheduled stop an hour outside Paris, and while the other passengers bicker, confide and flirt, the narrator remembers – lovers, disappointments, childhood, marriage. You can read further excerpts from the book on the CB editions website.

CB editions, founded in 2007, publishes poetry alongside short fiction and other writing, including work in translation. Its poetry titles have won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize three times (in 2009, 2011 and 2013), and have been shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the Forward First Collection Prize. In 2011 CBe inaugurated Free Verse, a one-day book fair for poetry publishers to show their work and sell direct to the public; the event was repeated in 2012 and 2013, with over 50 publishers taking part, and has become an annual event. The next fair will take place around Easter 2014.

Find out more about the publisher from the website, where you can also sign up to the CB editions mailing list, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook to keep up-to-date with its activities.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

СЛУТИМ

February 24, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Шта то промиче
изнад мог сна?
То, између ноћи и дана,
низ степенице
силазе гласови,
једно сумерско лице,
киша и појаве у поноћ,
њихова сам расправа.
Све то на Сатурну одзвања.
Мој се лик у прстен претвара.
Преостали свемир несклон је нади.
Али ходник тече даље:
стубови, углови, тама
и Чувар
мог дна.
У зору
заборављам име.
Полако и сан нестаје.
Ипак, неко остаје.
Како се зове тај шум?

I have forebodings

What is that gliding by
above my dream?
Those, between night and day,
are voices descending,
down the stairs
a Sumerian face,
rain and apparitions at midnight,
I am their quarrel.
All of this reverberates on Saturn.
My face turns into a ring.
The rest of the universe is disinclined to hope.
But the corridor flows on:
columns, corners, darkness
and the Guardian
of my depths.
At dawn
I forget its name.
Slowly the dream fades, too.
Yet someone remains.
What is that sound called?

by Ivana Milankov, translated by James Sutherland-Smith andZorica Petrović

The Oxford HumanRights Festival has begun, and this week’s schedule includes a reading byJamie McKendrick and a discussion between him and the Director of the PoetryCentre, Dr Eóin Flannery, about his 2007 collection Crocodiles and Obelisks.The event takes place on Friday 28 February in Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford.To book tickets and to view the other Poetry Centre events during OHRF, visitthe festival page.

There is another fine reading taking place on Sunday 2 March at The AlbionBeatnik Bookshop. Jo Bell (former Director of National Poetry Day),Helen Mort (author of Division Street, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize),and Alan Buckley (winner of the Wigtown Poetry Prize) will be reading. Entry is£5, and you are advised to book your tickets in advance, since space islimited! Visit the bookshop’s Facebook pagefor details.

‘I have forebodings’ by Ivana Milankov is copyright © Ivana Milankov, 2013, and translated by James Sutherland-Smith and Zorica Petrović. It is reprinted by permission of ArcPublications from Dinner withFish and Mirrors (Arc Publications, 2013).

Notes from Arc Publications:

Ivana Milankov was born in 1952, in Belgrade, Serbia. She is the author of seven books of poetry and one book of poetical prose – a dream diary. She is a translator of English and American poetry, including the work of Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, W. B. Yeats, William Blake and Allen Ginsberg.

Serbia’s rich historical and religious history is evident in the poems inDinner with Fish and Mirrors and there is an untiring effort to reach beyond the sensations of the world around her towards mystical revelation, to communicate the incommunicable.

To read further selections from the book, visit the Arc website , where you can also read an essay by Ivana Milankov, and an interview with the translator James Sutherland-Smith.

Since it was founded in 1969, Arc Publications has adhered to its fundamental principles – to introduce the best of new talent to a UK readership, including voices from overseas that would otherwise remain unheard in this country, and to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary poetry. Arc also has a music imprint, Arc Music, for the publication of books about music and musicians. As well as its page on Facebook , you can find Arc on Twitter .

Visit Arc’s website to join the publisher’s mailing list, and to find full details of all publicationsand writers . Arc offers a 10% discount on all books purchased from the website (except Collectors’ Corner titles). Postage and packing is free within the UK.

from Night Office

February 17, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

We were assembled on the station platform.
He told us not to leave, but rather wait
for his return, whose signs would take that form
we should know when we saw them. We should wait,
wait only, for that certain day; no storm,
however violent, should now create
an instant’s doubt of his assured return.
It was magnificent; we felt that we should learn

in due course every needed detail, nor
should we at this time question him, but stand
receiving & accepting, and know more
at just those times and seasons when his hand
should by his agents from that further shore
send news, signs, tokens, which might still strike land
here in our clandestine assembly, tell
us of the last new happenings in hell.

Whether in Khabarovsk or in New York,
some word should come, some emissary find
one of our number: as the stooping hawk
finds out the field mouse, so his keen love’s kind
and irresistible dexterity
should at each crossed road or each dubious fork
know how to reach that one of all our kind
who would with the correct celerity

alert the rest. The train began to leave.
The last I saw of him, through sparkling glass,
or what I could make out, where time can thieve
no particle of recollection, may not class
it with some set of likeness, nor bereave
me of one colour, one swift stroke or pass,
but still retains each single thought & gesture,
each hard-won glimpse & hardly-spoken texture,

was his retreating smile at once and frown:
where the cheek’s stoicism bore its gloss
set by the brow’s lines where they just turned down
but where the mouth’s serenity took loss
for gain in knowledge; so without a sound
his lips formed one word which it was impossible
to make out, though eye strain and ear
work its drums over so it might come near

that latest testament.

by Simon Jarvis

A reminder that several Poetry Centre events are taking place during the Oxford Human Rights Festival, including a talk by Poetry Centre Director, Dr Eóin Flannery, about the divisive political and human rights figure, Roger Casement, on Monday 24 February, and a reading and discussion with Jamie McKendrick about his 2007 collection Crocodiles and Obelisks on Friday 28 February. To book tickets, visit the festival page.

Oxford Brookes students from the Department of English and Modern Languages have launched a project to encourage year 7 and 8 Oxford Academy pupils to get excited about creative writing and literature – and they need your help to fund the project! The scheme could culminate in an event at the Oxford Literary Festival. You can find out more about the project – and how to make it happen – on the Hubbub site.

‘from Night Office‘ is copyright © Simon Jarvis, 2013, and reprinted from his book Night Office, published by Enitharmon Books in 2013.

Notes from Enitharmon:

Simon Jarvis is Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics at Cambridge University. He has published studies of Wordsworth, Adorno, and Shakespearean criticism. His previous poetry publications include The Unconditional (2005) and Dionysus Crucified (2011).

Simon Jarvis writes that: ‘Night Office is the initial publication from among a small set of long poems for which the collective title is The Calendar. Each poem relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. Each explores those manners in which the invisible life of the soul throws off from itself tunes, colours, times, histories and nations; each, from verse constraints upon syllable and intonation, works towards the concrete freedoms of poetic thinking. Night Office listens out, through its long white night, for the silencing of human sounds – as these last fall asleep into their signs.’ You can read a review of the book from the Cambridge Humanities Review on the Enitharmon website.

‘William Blake dreamed up the original Enitharmon as one of his inspiriting, good, female daemons, and his own spirit as a poet-‐artist, printer-‐publisher still lives in the press which bears the name of his creation. Enitharmon is a rare and wonderful phenomenon, a press where books are shaped into artefacts of lovely handiwork as well as communicators of words and worlds. The writers and the artists published here over the last forty-‐five years represent a truly historic gathering of individuals with an original vision and an original voice, but the energy is not retrospective: it is growing and new ideas enrich the list year by year. Like an ecologist who manages to restock the meadows with a nearly vanished species of wild flower or brings a rare pair of birds back to found a colony, this publisher has dedicatedly and brilliantly made a success of that sharply endangered species, the independent press.’ (Marina Warner.)

You can sign up to the mailing list on the Enitharmon site to receive a newsletter with special offers, details of readings & events and new titles and Enitharmon’s Poem of the Month.

Copyright information: please note that the copyrights of all the poems displayed on the website and sent out on the mailing list are held by the respective authors, translators or estates, and no work should be reproduced without first gaining permission from the individual publishers.

On the Fell

February 10, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

Winds have
so cut it it
can give
an edge
to wind

a sand
stone
boulder
sandblasted

to a blade a breathless bone
releasing these sharp grains of sand

by John Birtwhistle

Two reminders from the Poetry Centre: the Department of English and Modern Languages is offering one three year, full-time PhD studentship. For the successful candidate the home/EU fee will be paid by the Faculty and the student will receive an annual stipend of £7000 for three years beginning in 2014/15. The deadline for applications is Monday 10 March, and there are more details on the Department’s website. Please spread the word!

Don’t forget too that the Poetry Centre and the Ashmolean Museum have launched ‘Picture This!’, their Pre-Raphaelite poetry competition, open to all Sixth Formers studying in Oxford. More details can be found on the Ashmolean’s website.

Notes from Anvil Press:

This is John Birtwhistle‘s first collection of poems since Our Worst Suspicions (1985), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In the meantime much of his writing has gone into libretti, including The Plumber’s Gift, performed by English National Opera. He has not, however, been neglecting poetry – as can be seen from the energetic variety of form and tone displayed here. Birtwhistle accepts from modernism the duties of visual clarity, concision, and originality of phrase; but he unites this with a romantic commitment to feeling and to organic form. His subject matter is wide-ranging as ever, but shows a new intensity about the life cycle. You can read further selections from Eventualities on the Anvil website.

John Birtwhistle was a Writing Fellow at the University of Southampton before becoming a Lecturer in English at the University of York. He now lives in Sheffield with his wife, son, and daughter.

Knitting Time

February 3, 2014April 5, 2022 ~ oxfordbrookesuni

She sings those star-garments into shape
in her sleep on nights when there is light
enough to birth a new universe.
But now, her melody won’t settle.

Like Lot’s wife she looks back at glass dripping upwards,
hears the movement whisper,
the pane slipping slowly into sand
as echoes yield an unflinching moment.

Inhabiting a raw time, of all tomorrows, yesterdays,
she breathes, but nothing will hold;
and once the terror takes, Hell takes over
with a host of illusions, tenebrous voices
cutting the belly of her self-belief.

And so back to the knitting vessel
carrier of her soul into the living land,
the safe place of cross stitch, cable and twist
where the breath can be measured
just one step, one small step, beyond fear.

by Colin Hambrook

News of an upcoming poetry event: ‘People and Places: a poetry reading at the Albion Beatnik Bookshop’, on Sunday 9 February from 6.00-7.30pm, Walton Street, Oxford. There will be readings by David Attwooll, Kayo Chingonyi, Pey Colborne, Catherine Faulds, Lucy Ingrams, Jenny Lewis, Rachel Piercey, and Lyn Thornton.

Notes from Waterloo Press:

Knitting Time recounts the author’s experience of growing up in a household dominated by religious beliefs, where the world was scheduled to end in 1975. Hambrook charts his mother’s deterioration after being expelled from the Jehovah’s Witnesses faith, as she descended into psychosis. A series of striking black and white drawings by Hambrook complement the texts, adding extra depth and dimension to this compelling collection. With echoes of William Blake, Ted Hughes, Spike Milligan, and Jeanette Winterson, Knitting Time provides powerful insights into millenarianism, psychosis, and the bonds of love when they are tested by trauma and loss.

Colin Hambrook is a writer, editor and artist. He established DAO in 2004 and continues to develop the journal as a platform giving a voice to arts practitioners who identify with disability and the issues which underpin arts practice from a disability perspective. In 2013 he produced Knitting Time – a project exploring concerns around psychosis – and exhibited the resulting body of work at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester in November 2013. His second illustrated collection Knitting Time, published by Waterloo Press, was one of the bodies of work, which came out of this research and development project. You can follow his work on his blog.

Waterloo Press offers readers an eclectic list of the most stimulating poetry from the UK and abroad. We promote what’s good of its kind, finding a commonality amongst the poets we publish. Our beautifully designed books range from lost modernist classics, translations and vibrant collections by the best British poets around. Our translation list is growing to 25% of our output.

Waterloo Press brings radical and marginalised voices to the fore, mirroring their aesthetics in outstanding book design, including dust jackets; large font; and original artwork. With its growing list, Waterloo Press promotes at last a permeable membrane between contemporary schools, quite apart from archiving a few sacred vessels for good. WP fosters a poetics based on innovation with respect for craft, bloody-mindedness and as founder Sonja Ctvrtecka put it: ‘An elegant unstuffiness – a seagull perched on a Porsche.’ Now the major poetry publisher of the south-east, we also believe strongly in a community of like-minded independent presses. We’ve become a land.

Find out more about Waterloo Press via its website, or ‘like’ the publisher on Facebook.